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Sometime over the past couple of years I caught a flash of a red bird that wasn’t a cardinal. I looked it up in my bird book and decided it must be a summer tanager. Filed away and forgot about it.

This spring I noticed a bright flash of coral-orange-yellow-green in the top of a tree.

It almost looked like some sort of parakeet or parrot. I asked my Facebook friends to ID it. A short time later, one friend said it was a summer tanager.

??? I thought those were red?

I went back to my field guide and sure enough, females and juvenile males can vary in color from yellowish green to coral to orange.

To me, although I’ve seen them described as large, tanagers are not really big birds; they are in between a blue bird and a robin in size.

I’ve enjoyed watching the summer tanagers this year, and then I got an extra surprise.

A nest! I heard the nestlings peeping and found the nest. Both parents showed up quickly bearing insects. I only saw the female feeding though. Maybe she takes the extras from dad. I’ll have to keep watching and see.

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Sometimes you can see a little crest on the tanagers’ heads. Most of the time they hold the feathers smooth. I read that tanager’s main diet in the summer is wasps and bees and they will beat the insect on a branch to subdue it and remove the stinger.

It looks to me like this tanager has prepared an insect pancake! It could also be a fecal sac from the nestlings.